Saturday, February 21, 2015




                                                THE ORIGIN OF WINGING IT

                                                         

ADAH ISAACS MENKEN
KNOWN FOR HER STARRING ROLE
IN THE EPIC ENTERTAINMENT MAZEPPA
MEETS HER MATCH IN ACTOR JAMES E. MURDOCH
WHEN SHE CO-STARS WITH HIM IN SHAKESPEARE'S
MACBETH, AKA THE SCOTTISH PLAY.




MR. MURDOCH (PICTURED BELOW) WROTE ABOUT THE ENCOUNTER IN HIS BOOK   The Stage or Recollections of Actors and Acting, From an Experience of Fifty Years: A Series of Dramatic Sketches by James E. Murdoch (Philadelphia, J. M. Stoddart & Co. 1880)


                                                                                               






"I have before referred to an instance in which Mr. Macready was placed in a distracting dilemma through the blundering of an incompetent actor at the culminating point of one of his finest situations in Macbeth. One can well imagine the feelings of a performer who, yielding himself up to the successive development of the plot and incidents of one of the grandest productions of our greatest dramatist, and being wound up to a high pitch of interest and effect, suddenly finds himself utterly overthrown by the inefficiency or neglect of other performers engaged in the same scene.  And yet from the “hand-to-mouth” mode of management prevalent all over the country the tragedian and his audience are constantly subjected to such results. Of many cases in point which have come under my own observation, I am reminded of the following, in which it will be observed inordinate vanity and misdirected impulses led a young lady to attempt without preparatory study the impersonation of one of Shakespeare’s most powerful creations.
I was fulfilling a short engagement in Nashville, Tenn., and the manager had made an arrangement with Miss Adah Isaacs Menken (so famous for her Mazeppa performances) to act the leading female characters in my plays.  I found her, however, to be a mere novice, and not at all qualified for the important situation to which she had aspired.  But she was anxious to improve and willing to be taught. A woman of personal attractions, she made herself a great favorite in Nashville.  She dashed at everything in tragedy and comedy with a reckless disregard of consequences, until at length, with some degree of trepidation, she paused before the character of Lady Macbeth! I found in the first rehearsal that she had no knowledge of the part save what she had gained from seeing it performed by popular actresses of the day.
Miss Menken was a woman of literary taste, and had gained some reputation as a writer for newspapers and magazines.  She had withal a good understanding and a quick perception of what may be termed the more palpable signification of what was written, but could not rise to a perfect appreciation of its highest sense.  So she came to me and frankly said, “I know nothing of this part, and have a profound dread of it, but I must act it, for I have told the manager that I was up to the performance of the leading character.”  “Why,” I replied, “you don’t even know the words, and have no time to study them.”  “Oh, that’s of no consequence,” she replied.  “I can commit the lines in a few hours if you will run over them and mark the emphasis for me.”  “But,” I said, “that will not do unless you have a preconceived idea of the character and an appreciation of its purposes in relation to Macbeth.  You can give no proper expression to the emphatic words when they are pointed out to you, for you have no time to acquire the power to bring them into proper subjection to your will as expressive agents. All I can do under the circumstances is to read the part to you, and leave you to your own resources for the rest.”
I accordingly gave the lady a few general ideas of the part, and finished by begging her at least to learn the words, and for the acting, trust to chance. Night came, and with it came Miss Menken arrayed to personate the would-be queen. She grasped the letter and read it in the approved style, holding it at arms’ length and gaspingly devouring the words with all the intensity of ferocious desire; then, throwing her arms wildly over her head, she poured out such an apostrophe to guilt, demons, and her own dark purposes that it would have puzzled any one acquainted with the text to guess from what unlimited “variorum” she could have studied the part.  However, as Casca said of Cicero,”He speaks Greek!” and Miss Menken spoke what the people thought was “Shakespeare,” and, for aught they knew to the contrary, it might have been Greek too.
Flushed with her reception and the lavish applause which followed the reading of the letter, she entered on the next scene, where Lady Macbeth chastises the flagging will of her consort “with the valor of her tongue,” and at her sneering reference to “the poor cat i’ the adage” she swept by her liege lord as if he were a fit object for derision and contempt; and then came another round of applause.  After Macbeth’s announcement that he was capable of doing “all that dare become a man,” the lady returned to the charge with most determined scorn and denunciation, and in tones which might have become a Xantippe* exclaimed,
What beast was it, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place 
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you.

Here, “taking the stage,” she rushed back to Macbeth, and laying her head on his shoulder whispered in his ear, “I don’t know the rest.” From that point Macbeth ceased to be the guilty thane, and became a mere prompter in a Scotch kilt and tartans. For the rest of the scene I gave the lady the words. Clinging to my side in a manner very different from her former scornful bearing, she took them line by line before she uttered them, still, however, receiving vociferous applause, and particularly when she spoke of dashing out the brains of her child; until at length poor Macbeth, who was but playing a ‘second fiddle” to his imperious consort, was glad to make his exit from a scene where “the honors” were certainly not “even.”

Having recovered from her stage-fright, Miss Menken, by what is termed  “winging it”---that is, by throwing down the book between the wings of the scene when going on the stage, and taking it up again for another reading when going off--contrived to get through the part.


*Xantippe: (zan tip ee)   Wife of Socrates, proverbial as a scolding and quarrelsome
woman or any nagging, peevish, or irritable woman.


                                             

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